Frustration Rhymes
by lfh
Summary: AU slash. When militants threaten to close down his school, Sirius's parents send him to a relative's in the States. There, he smokes, thinks about a girl, and feigns insanity. This angst-rut is soon disrupted when he begins exchanging letters with a boy.


Frustration Rhymes  
  
I hate it here. It's not an especially gratifying hate, one that fills the old veins with the meth-like ragefire. No, more apathetic. I hate it here because it bores me. I hate my parents for shipping me off to summer with distant relations. I hate whatever shit-for-name suburb I'm stuck in.  
  
American music isn't bad, however. I rather like some of the post-punk stuff they've got going on here. I like blaring it through the pulsing hearts of my stereo speakers and proclaiming my frustration to this sedated little neighborhood.  
  
But that's no excuse for a bit of this! I'm supposed to blend in entirely here, lest anyone suspect a thing about my parents' work. So I nick their liquor as a small vengeance, to prevent that dryness-feeling from getting to my brain and rotting hope. Hope's best to have these times, when darkness could overtake it all.  
  
I don't want the Traditionalists, those death eaters, to control Hogwarts school. But these measures of isolation on the part of my parents are really quite unnecessary; my friends get to stay in England and communicate with one another! Their parents aren't so protective that they send their child off to the States on a few days' notice for the summer with no goddamn forwarding address!  
  
I play my favorite mixtape very loudly. My third cousin, or whatever she is, crashes up the stairs to glare at me. I laugh in her angry face, causing her eyes to widen as she, scared, tiptoes back down the stairs. Let them think me mad. It makes them leave me be.  
  
I take off all of my clothes, just in case one of them decides to come back and make shock in order, and it's fucking comfortable besides. Walking over to my pile of library books, I decide that American literature isn't half bad either. I like all the drug-riddled poetry, washing around my beach- glass thoughts like a forbidden ocean. I like also the novels that match my angsty little heartbeats, uThe Catcher in the Rye/u and so forth. In the midst of enough music, reading, and alcohol, I can nearly forget where I am.  
  
But I'm forgetting where I used to be. If I were any more paranoid, I'd suspect amnesia, because I can remember little before two weeks ago. I can remember that I don't want to be here, and I can remember Nathalya Zambini. Oh, Thale.  
  
Memories flicker when photographs are too still. I know I had a previous life as a student at Hogwarts only because I tell it to myself every day.  
  
After an hour or so, I realize a need to go outside. I've done nothing but fuck around in my room for the past two weeks, just brooding and feigning insanity, except for a trip last week to the library and the record store. Delayed reaction to a solitary confinement: I want sunshine and a cigarette. I put on a pair of pants and wrap the top of me in a bedsheet. The house is built against a hill, so my second-story sliding door opens onto solid ground. Animated by the blanket-sun, I run and stumble into the no-man's-land slope between the backyard and those of the neighborhood built above this one, Closing my eyes, I sprawl out on my back and take a drag from the cigarette I've lit. God. Summer-womb.  
  
I think I first feel rather than hear the music, the rap growling sensual, the bass making the grasses tremble. The source, I creep up to it on my belly, snake-like. Silently, I finish my cigarette, and with a final exhale, I bury my face in the grass-coated slope along the picket fence, reminded of the Thale's well-rounded bust. As with her breasts, I surrender my face full of arrogance to this bit of hill without there even being a war, my starved heart gorging. I miss her, if not solely for her bloomed- rose body and comforting wit.  
  
When my mind stops filling with thoughts of Thale, I lift my head and hear. The rap is still growling, but beneath it, within it, is the playing of piano, melancholy-sounding, like the score to one of those sad Continental war films. And it gives a heartbeat to what I've been listening to, so haunting altogether that the vibrations jump to the lowest orbital of my body, perception just an example of atomics, and my whole crotch region feels flooded, twitching.  
  
I lie there, resisting the need to go back to my room and fuck off. My cock throbs, beating painfully against the raped earth. And then, as unnoticed as it started, the music stops. First the piano, naturally, then the rap, and quiet is restored to the air. Footsteps sound against the patio beyond the picket fence, and I hear a cigarette withdrawn and the click of a lighter. It would be a tragedy, were I discovered like this, on my belly, breathless, hard like porcelain, and I slither, ease back to my room, unnoticed.  
  
Once back in my room, I slide my hands down my pants, fucking off to the rap-rhythm still beating in my brain. After I come, I collapse on my disheveled bed and stare at the ceiling. I've got to tell this piano-player- rap-listener-cigarette-smoker something, anything, at least that I can hear. A letter, yes, that'll be it. Hands still sticky, I fumble around for a pen and piece of paper, writing  
  
IPiano-player-rap-listener-cigarette smoker: I heard you, when I was out walking in the backyard. I cannot describe how your music felt. Lovely would be a whisper compared to a scream. It slides, it wanks, dissolving clothing, an invisible hand bringing me off beautiful. Here is maddening, and I am bored. It's better than alcohol, nearly better than sex, that someone so near me can frighten stagnant, suburban air into seeping salvation./I  
  
and label the envelope only with an address. With that sent off, I crawl under the covers with a book and read until it's late enough for me to raid the kitchen.  
  
The next morning my third-cousin awakens me rudely, standing over my bed, dangling an envelope over my sleep-coated face.  
  
"This came in the mail slot, and it's not for any of us, so it must be yours, Sirius. Do you have a girlfriend, in England?" she says in a sing- song voice.  
  
I muster my best "Give it to me and quickly leave, vapid baby-wench, for I am your insane distant relative from across the pond!" look considering my sleep-numb state. She drops the letter on my face and skips out the door. Grumbling, I open it.  
  
IDear Eavesdropper,  
Thank you, although the other inhabitants of my house would tend to disagree. Hopefully, you are, like me, in the general area surrounding sixteen. If not, kindly fuck off elsewhere and never bother me again./I  
  
No name. No gender. Only an age and the return address. I put it aside and contemplate a reply while falling back asleep.  
  
A few hours later, I wake up, the events of the morning forgotten. I lie in my bed, on slumber's bitter death, and I solely wish to know. Subsequently, my thoughts are all Thale. I trace my memory back to last winter, thinking to spend the afternoon retravelling each kiss, each cigarette, each conversation that was tinged by by our indefinite union.  
  
It was December, which I find to be a beautiful month because it means winter's stillbirth, with slush-grey placenta and an ice-fetus floatingly attached to the regrets of autumn and the unknowable promise of spring. Thale and I had skipped dinner to hang out in the commons room of her dorm. We had half a bottle of shitty wine and were sharing it, sprawled out on two couches we had pushed together to form a sort of bed for our drunkenness. Thale closed her eyes and swallowed more of the wine, grimacing at its taste. Her lips stained so crimson and her eyes so moss- green, mistletoe came immediately to mind.  
  
"I swear to God, I've got this knot of sexual frustration all up in me. I'd bet you my last eighth of grass that my cunt will turn bright blue within the week," she said. "You'd think it would be nothing to get laid at a co- ed boarding school."  
  
"I could always set you up for one of the guys on my dorm hall," I offered.  
  
"Oh, the Marauders are nice, but James has Lily, Remus isn't my type, and Peter's just a little too subserviant for my tastes. To be honest, I have no wish to date anyone in your dorm," she replied. "But, ah, Sirius?"  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"This probably sounds vague or stupid or something, but do you ever feel like something is missing in the whole concept of friendship?" she asked.  
  
"Yeah, this lack of completion sometimes. Sometimes, with certain friends, holding hands and kissing and fucking would also make sense. Not anything terribly romantic, just a physical expression of friendship. Something very fluid, temporary, and ultimate with the right friend," I replied, feeling like I was babbling.  
  
"Um, so maybe like me?" Thale asked.  
  
I grinned, slightly drunk. "Yeah, that would be good," I replied.  
  
Thale laughed and nodded. We kissed sloppily.  
  
"Because I don't love you beyond as a close friend, and I don't want to go to the Yuletide Ball with you or have you bring me flowers. I'll save that sort of sentiment for someone I feel romantically attached to. No offense, I hope," she said after a few minutes of kissing.  
  
"None taken," I replied. "I feel exactly the same way. And if either of us should chance to fall in love or into anything else requiring monogamy in the near future, we'll be friends still, but..."  
  
"With nothing else, yes. Agreed," she finished.  
  
We shook hands on this and then continued snogging until evening classes.  
  
And then I remember a week or so later, in my dorm room, when Thale brought a joint, how it burned our fingers in its smallness. And I felt above all things comfortable, all things sharply defined albeit my senses fuzzy. We closed the curtains around my bed and started kissing. My hands moved below her sweater, my minor burns soothed by the liquidity of her breasts. She took off her sweater; I took off my t-shirt. As Thale tongue-tormented my nipples, I crept my right hand up her skirt, delighted that there was nothing cottony beneath it to hinder me. I dared my fingers between her, first with my middle finger in her cunt-slick softness, my other fingers dancing about her clitoris, my left hand on her back, trembling.  
  
"I'm sorry, but it looks like I'm giving a big 'fuck you' to your uterus right now," I said, biting Thale's lower lip.  
  
"My womb can handle a few insults. Too bad it's not an effective method of birth control," she replied, her eyes widening with orgasm.  
  
"Which, ah, reminds me," I mentioned. Thale fumbled with my belt buckle. "I don't believe I have any. Do you?"  
  
"A little help here?" Thale said. I undid my belt and took off my pants with one hand. She slid a hand around my cock, which jumped in welcome. "Well, hello there. No, I don't have any nearby. Another time for that."  
  
"Okay," I replied, letting another finger up her cunt.  
  
Thale's eyes widened like she was finding God. Whom I came to believe had to exist in order for male nipples and G-spots to create such holy experiences. And yes, I believe that good orgasms are holy. They are beautiful, completing, and biologically unnecessary.  
  
That first time, she came onto my fingers, and I stared at it for awhile afterwards, watching it dry, feeling its girlglue texture.  
  
This thought a pleasant enough dance for my head, I found another piece of paper and pen and wrote:  
  
IHello again. I'm soon to be seventeen, if that soothes your worries any. Seventeen is rarely a comfort to anyone else.  
  
I was thinking today of a girl I used to fuck, and perhaps I still would be if I were home right now. I don't know if I miss her desperately or not. I mean, I miss her company and so on, but it doesn't feel heart-rending./I 


End file.
